Marketers are seeing the data and portfolio light

A recent interview courtesy of McKinsey with 4 senior marketing executives of Carlsberg, Nokia, Wal-Mart and Yahoo! revealed some promising trends and thoughts amongst marketers. Progressive marketers are embracing many of the tenets of corporate portfolio management which is a very good sign. I was particularly glad to see two comments in the interview by Alex Myers of Carlsberg who touches upon the need for data-driven decisions as well as the portfolio approach. Excerpts below:

"The Quarterly: What skills and traits do you think are particularly important for marketers today?

Alex Myers: The marketing function is developing along two extremes: the advertising guru, on the one hand, and what one might term the fact-based businessman, on the other. The trick is to find the right balance. The journey, which so far has been from advertising guru to communications guru, is entering a new phase that requires us to be businessmen and explain things clearly to management. Itâ€™s no longer enough to say, â€œTrust my campaignâ€ or â€œIt looks great.â€ You have to explain things internally in a much more relevant way. The marketing function is becoming much more accountable, with CEOs and CFOs saying, â€œOkay, since youâ€™re spending all this money, we want to know if itâ€™s effective or not. Is our business growing or is it just the budget?â€ The challenge is not to lose the passion and religion of brands or consumers but to do it in a fact-based way.

The Quarterly: A deep understanding of customersâ€™ needs, of course, is a foundation for building strong brands. How are you managing your brands in todayâ€™s increasingly complex environment?

Alex Myers: Weâ€™re shifting from being a single-brand-driven business to becoming portfolio managers.7 And thatâ€™s a big transition. I would go so far as to say that the strength of a portfolio in the beer business is now much more important than the strength of individual brands. Five to ten years ago that wasnâ€™t the case: the brand was everything."

Kudos to Alex and Carlsberg for seeing and embracing such discipline in the way they manage marketing.

Anand Sanwal is the former Vice President, Investment Optimization and Strategic Business Analysis, at American Express where he built and led the company's corporate portfolio management effort managing several billion dollars per annum of discretionary investment spend. It is widely recognized as the most ambitious corporate portfolio management undertaking by a large- or mid-size corporation. He also oversaw the CFO's strategic planning group in addition to also leading the creation and management of the companyâ€™s inaugural $50MM Chairmanâ€™s Innovation Fund. He is the author of the book Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management: Aligning Investment Proposals with Strategy. He is a founder of consulting & advisory company Brilliont.

He speaks and consults frequently with research organizations and companies on the topics of innovation, corporate portfolio management and cost optimization and has worked with leading financial services, pharma, high-tech, healthcare and public sector institutions. His work has been featured in Business Finance Magazine, BPM Magazine, The Journal of Accounting & Finance, Baseline Magazine and The Deal amongst others. He graduated from the Wharton School of Business with a degree in Finance and Accounting and also has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. More info can be found at Brilliont or at his personal website. He can be reached at asanwal@brilliont.com.

As you can probably tell, Anand also enjoys writing descriptions about himself in the third person.

He is also involved with Brilliont spin-off ChubbyBrain - the world's largest user-generated database of innovative startups. In addition to delivering intelligent, well-structured information on startups, ChubbyBrain also encourages its members to provide expert insights and critiques of emerging business models, technologies and companies. Presently, the platform has over 13,000 startups and over 900 investors (VCs, angel investment groups, corporate venture groups and individuals) in our database.

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Insights, pragmatic discussion, and conversation about corporate portfolio management, innovation and cost optimization as well as ...
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Insights, pragmatic discussion, and conversation about corporate portfolio management, innovation and cost optimization as well as general business hilarity. Whether you call it enterprise portfolio management, IT portfolio management, project portfolio management, investment optimization or some other term, efforts at optimizing your resource allocation are key to long term organizational success.
I abhor unproductive complexity and am wary of many of the purported elixirs out there (most software 'solutions', scorecards, dashboards).
The insights in this blog are the result of work in the trenches building what is regarded as one of the most successful corporate portfolio management disciplines within a large organization at American Express.
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